Archives

I’ll try to go quickly through the New America Foundation’s (NAF’s) Jason Delisle’s and Alexander Holt’s Washington Postopinion piece from Friday. Reacting to news that the president’s budget forecasts income-based repayment programs (IBR) will cost the government an additional $21.8 billion, the authors argue that “too much” of it is attributable the administration’s changes to IBR, i.e. reducing monthly payments even more and accelerating loan forgiveness to 20 years from 25. Their article has many problems.

One, Delisle and Holt don’t provide evidence that the $21.8 billion comes from the changes to IBR. They’re just conjecturing. My hunch is that the additional costs are mainly attributable to the changes in the budget’s model that don’t anticipate as much job growth as before—or just increased participation in IBR. Without this evidence, the rest of Delisle’s and Holt’s article is just righteous huffing.

Two, the authors use this pretext to slide into their grad-students-are-abusing-IBR claim the NAF has been making for a few years now. This argument is problematic because the problem isn’t IBR so much as the Grad PLUS Loan Program, which the authors understand is unlimited and to their credit have advocated abolishing elsewhere. That’s all fine and good, but if the problem is Grad PLUS, then it’s not IBR, and the authors should focus on that instead. More on this point below.

Three, the grad-students-are-abusing-IBR claim has never been substantiated either. The NAF has always trotted it out in hypotheticals without doing the actual research. How many (and what percentage of) graduate debtors are (a) on IBR and (b) earn high enough incomes that could allow repayment under 25-year or consolidated repayment plans without compromising their living standards? Also, how many grad debtors are on IBR but are not earning enough to repay their loans under the older repayment plans?

These questions are crucial because until they’re answered those of us sitting at the feet of the East Coast think-tank elite can’t weigh how many people unfairly benefit from the changes to IBR against those who do not. If every unfair IBR beneficiary is canceled out by dozens of debtors who will never repay their loans in 25 or 20 years, then it’s safe to say that the changes to IBR are useful and the adverse consequences minimal. (And it’s not like the IBR changes have influenced people’s graduate school enrollment behaviors as law school applicants are still falling.) In the end, Delisle’s and Holt’s arguments are really just revamped versions of welfare queen fear-mongering.

Four, Delisle and Holt do not regain any sympathy with their hypothetical graduate debtor, Robert, who finishes law school with $150,000 in debt and earns $70,000 per year. Here are the problems with Robert:

(a) For those of us who’ve done the research, Robert’s debt is plausible, but his income is not. Robert earns well over the median salary reported to NALP in 2013 ($62,467). Assuming that all non-reporting graduates are making less than the median, which I believe is fair, Robert is above the top 23 percent in law graduate earnings. He is quite atypical. The true median, which would include graduates working part-time and the 12.3 percent who were unemployed (and matter since we’re talking about debt repayment), is much, much lower. It’s likely many of them will never repay their loans. These people will benefit from the PAYE changes, but the NAF ignores them.

(b) The authors then fashion out of Robert’s rib a wife, who earns $80,000 per year. With an annual household/family income of $150,000, readers should recognize that this partnership is in the top 10 percent by household income. Is this common for graduate debtors? Probably, but again the authors don’t say.

(c) Delisle and Holt proceed to criticize IBR for not taking spousal incomes into account, that only 1.9 percent of Robert’s household’s/family’s income is going to his student loans. Are you shocked? Well, the response is, so what? Robert’s wife didn’t sign his master promissory notes any more than she would his gambling debts. If Robert wants to leave work to raise their kids, for example, doesn’t that imply that his wife will essentially assume his debts? Would the NAF say this if Robert were Roberta? How would unmarried Robert feel if he had to tell his bride-to-be that she’d be partly on the hook for his student loans if they got married? Again, what if Robert were Roberta, who would be more likely to take time off to raise children?

(d) The authors’ hypothetical is only as outrageous as the lopsided assumptions they bake into it. It’s one thing to say that Robert, unusual though he is, benefits more from the Obama administration’s changes to IBR than before. But it’s a rhetorical foul altogether to throw in a wife, whose high earnings Robert largely has no power over, and then blame IBR for the result. Delisle and Holt could just as easily give Robert’s parents multimillion-dollar lottery tickets or 5 percent of Maine’s landmass, but it would still have little relevance for IBR as a policy.

Five, the authors repeat that graduate debtors are the unfair beneficiaries of the administration’s changes to IBR, that they’re half of all IBR participants (unsurprising: they have undergraduate debts too), that they have higher incomes and are less likely to be unemployed than undergrad (or non-grad) debtors. Again, no income data on IBR participants is given, so Delisle’s and Holt’s IBR welfare queens are all speculative. Now, I’m sure some exist, but the NAF needs to show us the bodies and carefully tell us whether they’re worth less than the number of underemployed graduate debtors who won’t be able to repay their loans.

Six, even if they do that, all their talk of IBR’s “loan-forgiveness benefits” is really a problem with Grad PLUS loans, not IBR. As I wrote last week, IBR without Grad PLUS loans would be much more innocuous. It’s one thing for Delisle and Holt to make poor arguments with unrepresentative examples, but I question their credibility if they’re going to attack IBR, which I think we all agree was never crafted with Grad PLUS loans in mind, instead of the loan program itself. Why not attack the problem at its source? What’s so special about IBR, then? Nor does it help that they bait their readers with the $21.8 billion IBR shortfall and then switch it with the changes to IBR without evidence. For all their elegant, mathematical—and probably costly—policy papers, the NAF’s results almost always have zero external validity. Like, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say those folks had some kind of ulterior, partisan motive…

Seven, and finally, at the beginning of their article the authors characterize the federal loan program as “an implicit contract: Students get loans to go to college at reasonable interest rates, with no previous credit history required, but when they graduate, they [and their high-income spouses, apparently] have to pay them back. But that agreement is shifting.”

In their dreams. The “implicit agreement” was that the loans would make debtors more productive workers so they could fill higher-paying jobs that required additional skills. Little of this has turned out to be true: There’s no good evidence that widespread college education is raising our national income, and the government has pretty much reneged on its jobs promises.

As far as contracts go, this one has been drafted in favor of the government. When its underlying assumptions are true, everyone wins, but when they’re not, the government won’t be held accountable for self-serving research, false promises, and reckless lending. Instead, attempts to help the debtors will face resistance by people like Delisle and Holt, who will howl at all the alleged benefits the lucky-duckies are getting—and right now we’re only talking about grad student debt! Consequently, you should expect the endgame for all this unpayable student loan debt to be really, really acrimonious.

Some [the Brookings Institution] have argued that rising student debt and slow repayment are not particularly worrisome. After all, the story goes that if households can afford the modest payments they are making, then why worry about the cost of debt? But, of course, widespread failure to repay is a problem for the lender, in this case, federal taxpayers. We don’t fully understand yet how the burden of large amounts of debt on households’ balance sheets for long periods of time affects student borrowers’ behavior, but our research so far suggests that growing student debt has contributed to the recent decline in the homeownership rate and to the sharp increase in parental co-residence among millennials.

That, my readers, is as close as the Liberty Street gang is ever going to get to smacking-down the Brookings Institution.

If this keeps going I won’t even need to use an arrow to draw attention to the 90+ day delinquency line for student loan debtors. It’s already starting to look like a fish jumping out of the running river.

All household debt grew by $310 billion in 2014, but student loans accounted for only 20 percent of that, unlike last year, which was also the year of student loan delinquency. (Maybe they’ll have to throw out the Chinese zodiac altogether.) The year-over-year rate for student loans fell in 2014 as well, so at least that’s good news. The NY Fed people, though, are becoming … less restrained about student loans.

“[T]the increasing trend in student loan balances and delinquencies is concerning,” said Donghoon Lee, research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Student loan delinquencies and repayment problems appear to be reducing borrowers’ ability to form their own households.”

But don’t worry: The folks on Liberty Street are on the case. They plan to spend the rest of the week blogging on describing the debtors, explaining how the delinquency rate is calculated, and showing how debtors are (allegedly) paying down their balances. I doubt I’ll have time to comment on such things, but you ought to read it—if student debt is your thing.

For another perspective, data from the Department of Education also say things aren’t looking so hot for the American student loan debtor. As of Q1 2015, the number of guaranteed federal loan debtors who have defaulted on their loans has held at 4.4 million, and the number of total FFEL debtors is falling. The number of direct loan debtors in default has risen to 2.9 million from 2.4 million, about 10 percent of that total (9.1 percent in Q1 2014). Now, only 52 percent of all federal loans are in active repayment. More than one million direct loan debtors signed on to an income-sensitive repayment plan since last year. The number of people on PAYE nearly quandrupled. (It’s less than half a million, so that’s just big numbers divided by little ones.)

In short, people are starting to use IBR and its pals more, but they’re also defaulting.

Meanwhile, hours before the NY Fed worried that student loan delinquencies were on the rise, I read a Salon article suggesting that IBR isn’t very effective because it will forgive large student debt balances that are owed not by poor people but by those from affluent families, specifically law students. No relevant citation is given as to how we know that affluent law students will be IBR’s chief beneficiaries, but I’m sure all those poor people who attend for-profit law schools and graduate into chronic underemployment would beg to differ. It’s also odd that the article dismisses IBR on the logic that affluent families can bear it. If those debtors are so well off, why are they on IBR? Why should affluence matter when law school debtors can’t afford to pay their debts?

Nevertheless, isn’t it interesting that liberals and conservatives see IBR as a “debt-forgiveness” program? For conservatives it’s wasteful spending; for liberals its welfare for the wealthy. Sadly, these opinions have less to do with IBR itself and more to do with the Grad PLUS Loan Program. If people couldn’t borrow huge sums to begin with, everyone would see IBR in a better light.

The Salon article also apparently cleaves to the Elizabeth Warren assertion that the government is profiting on federal loans, even though that doesn’t make sense. If IBR cancels big loans while millions of people who aren’t on IBR are defaulting, then when, exactly, is the government going to be repaid?

Naturally, I don’t foresee IBR as a long-term success for the government; I agree with the CBO that losing $39 billion over a decade is probably not to the program’s credit. But it sounds to me like the 500,000 debtors who defaulted on their direct loans last year would benefit from IBR, and they’re probably not law school lucky duckies.

Anyone who needs a reason to retire the term “income inequality” need only look to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which recently released its fifth edition of its “Who Pays?” report on the impact of state taxes on household incomes. As with previous years, it dispiritingly finds that most states’ taxation structures are regressive, which means poor and middle-income households pay a higher proportion of their incomes in taxes than the highest earners.

As for specific taxes, the ITEP concludes that income taxes, particularly on individuals and corporations, are the most progressive, while sales and excise taxes are the most regressive. On property taxes, sandwiched between the two, the report states:

Overall, the property tax is a regressive tax.

What the ITEP is saying, in other words, is that taxes on property fall hardest on households that don’t own property. If this sounds like nonsense to you, it’s because it is. Usually we think that taxes fall first on that which is being taxed, so households and businesses with lots of property ought to be paying the bulk of state property taxes. Or, as economist Mason Gaffney wrote in his 1971 paper, “The Property Tax Is a Progressive Tax” (pdf), “To own property is to be rich, in the measure that one owns, and to tax the quality of richness should not be presumed to burden the poor more than the rich.” The ITEP begs to differ.

The only thing that should surprise anyone less than Hamline’s and William Mitchell’s merger should be their new name, Hamline|Mitchell [UPDATE: It’s actually Mitchell|Hamline. No idea why I got that wrong.], which sounds like a self-satisfied pharmaceutical company. In fact, Mitchell was the product of five law schools between 1900 and 1956. It’s like planetary accretion.

Personally, my money was on University of La Verne, which has still managed to stumble along, despite its superfluousness, but the biggest loser here is Slate‘s Jordan Weissmann who bet a mere $2.00 with UC-Berkeley’s Steven Davidoff Solomon that at least one law school would close or merge by 2018. Come on, everyone knew a law school would close or merge by 2018. Like, what were you thinking?? I swear, the best investment opportunities are squandered on the folks who can afford them.

The only real news of note is what we still don’t know. From the Star Tribune:

[Former Mitchell dean Eric] Janus acknowledged that combining the two schools will result in some cuts in faculty and staff. But he declined to speculate how many jobs may be lost, and said he hoped to avoid layoffs through voluntary attrition.

For reference: Fall 2014 [Hamline, Mitchell]:

Full-Time Faculty: 14, 26

Deans, librarians, and others who teach: 11, 13

Part-Time: 33, 191

The bad news for Minnesota’s legal market is former law profs competing for jobs—and I doubt their amazing experience as law profs will translate to partner offers.

To keep the analysis consistent with previous years, I used the class of 2013 even though data for the class on 2014 are available (and logged by moi). It’s a little problematic given that 2013 was the law graduate high tide, but that’s what happens when law schools enroll people without regard to employment outcomes.

I do not discussed the BLS’s proposed changes to its methodology for measuring occupational replacements. Assuming it’s approved, then for future versions, if the BLS separates annual replacement openings between those created by workers who leave the labor force and workers who move to different occupations, then I’ll use the labor force rate as the measure for “sustainable jobs.” It’s imperfect, but the same can be said of the current methodology.

I’ve also updated the site’s highly popular lawyers per capita by state page to include employed lawyers per capita and idle attorneys using the 2012 employment data. I am waiting on the ABA to update its national lawyer counts for 2014 and 2015. (They do plan on doing that right?)

At this time, I will brag that the Census Bureau’s press relations department cited my work on this topic last August.

Following up on last week’s post, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York put up a post titled, “Household Formation within the ‘Boomerang Generation’,” asking, “Why might young people increasingly reside with their parents?”

Of the excellent charts the authors provide, I’ll only reprint the one I like best:

The write:

The chart also suggests, however, that the trend in parental co-residence has not substantially changed the fraction of individuals living with a single roommate, an arrangement that in many cases is likely to be a romantic partnership. (These patterns are similar for thirty-year-olds, where our analysis using the Current Population Survey indicates that co-residence with one adult is a highly accurate indicator of romantic partnership.)

So when exactly are the <50 percent of 25 year-olds supposed to form romantic partnerships and buy out their parents’ homes?

Answer: Never.

Our results demonstrate that local economic growth is a mixed blessing when it comes to building youth independence: Improvement in youth employment conditions enables young people to move away from their parents, but rising local house prices are estimated to have forced many young people to move back home. These two effects partially offset each other.

…

[W]hile local economic growth, reflected in rising youth employment and escalating house prices, has mixed consequences for youth independence, the increasing magnitude of student debt among college graduates appears to be driving young people home and keeping them there.

It’s astonishing that the NY Fed of all places is more willing to tell it like it is than the East Coast media elite, who think we need to send everyone to college and that student debt isn’t a problem.